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How to Be Your Own PR Flack

By

Eric Felten

Updated Aug. 2, 2002 12:01 a.m. ET

What can one say about a book that guarantees "an easy recipe for great publicity" and yet hasn't gotten any?

It's not as though the strategies that Mark Mathis outlines in "Feeding the Media Beast" (Purdue University Press, 293 pages, $24.95) are wrong. They are often quite sound. For example, he lauds the inventiveness of PR men who pull publicity stunts, and he documents how the release of a pseudo-scientific "study" or "report" can manufacture media coverage.

It's just a shame that Mr. Mathis didn't put these observations to use for his own benefit. He might have phonied up some letterhead for a public-interest group, say, "The Council on Public Relations." And then the "council" could release the findings of its three-year investigation. "Sixty-Eight Percent of Press Releases Nationwide Found to Contain Falsehoods" could read the headline on its press release. "Twenty-Three Percent Are Outright Frauds" could be the subhead.

Buckets of Ink

Of course there would have to be enough blather to fill out an executive summary (and a few graphs and charts for good measure). But my guess is that Mr. Mathis could have banked any number of credulous clippings before announcing that his own press release fell into the 23% category. Stunt accompli.

Or Mr. Mathis might have taken a page from the reigning champion of book-tour publicity, Toby Young, the author of "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People." Indeed, publicity-hungry authors should always ask themselves "What would Toby do?" (or WWTD for short). But perhaps Mr. Mathis was unwilling to pose naked with a strategically placed copy of his book, as Mr. Young recently did for a New York newspaper.

Mr. Mathis may not have taken advantage of his own recipe, but even so most of what he says about getting ink is true enough. Well, nearly true enough. It's hard to get past his obsequious claim that "the vast majority of folks who work in the [news] business are passionate professionals who want to make the world a better place." The novelist Kingsley Amis once said in an interview that "laziness has become the chief characteristic of journalism, displacing incompetence." Anyone who has ever read a newspaper article on something he actually knows anything about would be hard-pressed to side with Mathis over Amis.

Still, there are valuable nuggets in "Feeding the Media Beast." Mr. Mathis's first three rules to getting publicity are: difference, emotion and simplicity, or DES, as he acronymizes it. Which is to say, if you want to get buckets of ink, you need to have a fresh (i.e., "different") story that is easy to understand ("simple") and affecting (taps into the reader's "emotion"). This formula isn't a bad guide to what makes a story a "story." It is a core concept that Mr. Mathis returns to repeatedly as he moves on to the Rule of Preparation, the Rule of Repetition and a half-dozen other rules on how to get a "DES"-defined story into print.

Las Vegas Buffet Rule

Mr. Mathis's need to list rules -- perhaps taken from a guide to writing management books -- can at times be comical, as when he writes: "Remember the number one rule for the Rule of Invention: don't go off half-cocked (chapter 5, Rule of Preparation)." And despite such a devotion to rules, some crucial ones are missing, such as the Las Vegas Buffet Rule: When planning a press event, don't forget the free jumbo-shrimp cocktails. I'm told some reporters are also rather partial to distilled spirits.

Hollywood publicists long ago perfected junkets built around the Las Vegas Buffet Rule. And though such generosity might not compromise the sort of honest writer who toils for mainstream publications, the swag does guarantee the presence of a reliable corps of freelance movie columnists -- the sort who usually only see print when their sycophantic reviews are blurbed in studio ad copy.

It is some measure of the difficulty of achieving reliable publicity, however, that even with such a well-greased blurb industry in place, Sony Pictures' PR shop was still driven last year to inventing a movie reviewer. "David Manning" was not embarrassed to declare Heath Ledger the "year's hottest new star!"

Which suggests that getting publicity is hard and there is no easy recipe. But there are ways to improve one's chances. Mr. Mathis is spot-on to note the media's defining weakness -- their insatiability. Every day the nation's newspapers have countless cubic feet of blank newsprint to fill. Umpteen cable news channels each have to make it through the hours of the day without resorting to a test-pattern. Sometimes they find actual news. Often they just need something, anything. Give a reporter something he can use, and he'll be grateful -- and you'll have your publicity.

The Barstool Test

How do you figure out what a reporter can use? Mr. Mathis's difference-emotion-simplicity mantra is a start. But a more intuitive gauge of success is what we might call the barstool test: Were you to meet a friend for a drink, would you bother to tell him the story, and would he be interested in it? If your spiel isn't worthy of a few minutes on a barstool, why would a million readers be interested in slogging through an article about it?

Of course, different friends are interested in different sorts of stories. The same goes for reporters and editors. It doesn't take much study to figure out what sorts of stories a given reporter or a given publication likes. Let's say you are in possession of a juicy bit of gossip about Jennifer Lopez. Who is more likely to bite, the New York Post's "Page Six" or the Journal of the American Medical Association? (Not that you would want to tip off JAMA anyway -- who wants his gossip peer-reviewed?)

Successful flacks are those who know the druthers of enough ink-stained wretches to peg the story at hand to the reporter most receptive to it. And then they package it up to make it painless for the reporter to meet his quota of column inches. Which brings us back to Mr. Mathis's thesis -- fill the media's needs and they will fill yours.